Season Over

“Gruesome,” “grisly,” “horrific”—every few weeks, there is a major injury in professional sports that earns one of these adjectives in online headlines, a reminder of what athletes put their bodies through and of the physical risks of our favorite games. Last night, in a loss to the Tampa Bay Rays, the Baltimore Orioles’ star third baseman Manny Machado, delightful and wildly talented at just twenty-one years old, caught his left foot on first base after hitting a ground ball single, causing his knee to buckle (all three adjectives from above apply equally well here) and leaving him collapsed on the ground. He was taken off the field in a stretcher. It was the most routine of baseball plays, done thousands of times even by someone as young as Machado—but most everything in baseball looks routine until something goes wrong.

Machado is among a group of thriving, and very young, players who have made this season such a fun one. Guys like Mike Trout, and Bryce Harper, and Yasiel Puig. It’s been a season during which fans around the league have celebrated the ageless Mariano Rivera (actually forty-three years old), as he took a final dignified victory lap through stadiums across the country. But for pure joy, it has been hard to beat watching the young players—kids, really—who’ve yet to master dignity. They make mistakes, but they compensate for them with power and speed and grace. This year, Machado had played in every game for the Orioles, had led the American League in doubles, and was finishing up what was among the best defensive seasons for a third baseman in years. Comparisons with the Orioles legend Brooks Robinson were nudging Robinson, nicknamed the Human Vacuum Cleaner, into second place. Maybe it was giddy and premature, but that’s what twenty-one-year-olds inspire.

Machado will be tested by doctors on Tuesday. We can reserve judgment on what the injury means for his future. He’s young, and bodies heal. He may be ready for next spring, snagging grounders at third and ripping into the ball at the plate. Here’s hoping. But fans know the stories of players who flashed historical talents only to be diminished by bad luck—one wrong step, or a ball that broke in an unexpected way.

Yesterday, writing about the ceremony honoring Mariano Rivera at Yankee Stadium over the weekend, Roger Angell quoted Bart Giamatti’s rueful line that baseball is “designed to break your heart.” That comes from “The Green Fields of the Mind” an essay that Giamatti wrote, in 1977, after the Red Sox lost their chance to catch the Yankees in their last at-bat of the season—Jim Rice, fly-out to center—missing the playoffs and ushering in another New England fall, with all its death notes. The Orioles lost last night in Tampa, their fourth straight against the Rays, whom they had been chasing for the Wild Card. The series began with hope, but they’re surely out of it now. All seasons end, even for the winners, despite our wish that they might last a little longer. “Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again,” Giamatti wrote. “And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.” But there is something especially bleak in this kind of ending, something that is both emblematic and real—a ballplayer taken off, no longer under his own power, done for the season. It happened last year for the Yankees, when Derek Jeter fractured his ankle in the twelfth inning of the first game of the A.L.C.S. against the Tigers. The Yankees lost that game, and then the next three. But it seemed over, looking back, right at the moment that Jeter went down. Two Octobers earlier, it was Ryan Howard, of the Philadelphia Phillies, tearing his Achilles trying to run out the last ground ball of a series against the St. Louis Cardinals. He didn’t make it more than a step or two out of the box before he hit the dirt. The Cardinals players charged onto the field to celebrate, while Phillies trainers rushed to Howard. Baseball seasons are supposed to end in whimpers—dribblers to the mound, weak fly balls, a pitch swung at and missed. It is altogether more final, and more cruel, when they end with a terrible bang.

Photograph: Chris O'Meara/AP

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.